This section is intended to provide a background or context to the disclosed embodiments. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, data, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., bandwidth and transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems.
In Release 8 (Rel-8) and Release 9 (Rel-9) of the 3GPP LTE specifications, the allocation of time-frequency resources in the uplink between a mobile device (user equipment, UE) and a base station (evolved Node B, eNodeB) are communicated to the mobile device via downlink control information (DCI) in physical downlink control channels (PDCCHs). Only one DCI format (format 0) is specified for this purpose and the protocol for resource allocation is limited to contiguous resource allocations based on a starting resource block (RB) location within a transmission bandwidth and a count of contiguous RBs from the starting location.
It is proposed for LTE-Advanced (LTE-A), that noncontiguous (i.e., multi-cluster) resource allocation be supported on an uplink component carrier. However, no resource allocation protocol has been specified.